‘Get up, stand up and climb the rope of hope
and open up again’ – Etheridge (from ‘Lucky’)
Last night dreams of a blue-eyed man, insistent, intent –
leading me along a city street, past
wild buskers singing the day into being.
Today, the rain gone, I sit on the verandah,
devouring Metelerkamp, who wrote a book-poem about her affair.
The sun as fierce as the poet growing her hands back,
as eager as my dream man, animus,
to lead me beyond the darkness of the house into the light.
Blue sky mirrors his azure eyes, and the poetry like flame
declaims itself across a dry hillside.
She speaks of becoming simpler : perhaps this is my gift,
my ability to distil, clarify, to sense the power beneath?
‘Hey, hey, hey’ sings Etheridge, later, night having fallen
‘I am a child’ – raucous, rough, different from me,
she who chooses to love women.
I – the abandoned one – who sought to restore
what was taken from me – the lost soul who, only once,
traded the same kind of sex for comfort,
before realising too late, her mistake,
I too can confess to indiscretions.
Then, my heart hurt as if I had twisted a knife into it.
I was shoved to the margins before I even realised
I had left the centre.
Now I work hard to reclaim an identity I did not consciously reject.
Foucault’s Panopticon reaches straight into the all-seeing sky.
‘Big Brother is watching,’ and beware those who would
wander into the shadows.
Sexuality’s a continuum, and love’s a sliding rule
But the feelings take me into a world
where bravado and logic do not apply.
Where reaching for his hand feels as all-consuming,
as holding a small baby who looks at me with
the strange unknowing eyes
of the helpless, of the still-to-be-loved.
24.10
Friday, October 24, 2008
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Monday, October 20, 2008
Defining love
Is love
finding solidity in emptiness:
a balustrade beneath the hand?
Or is it
the boy in the car seat behind you,
as you drive up roads known and unknown,
asking ‘where is God?’
Is he love?
Where is love?
The night you married his father
your stomach seven-months big with child,
you wept, as if you knew
the ruby would fall from your golden ring,
like the promises you made each other,
lost now.
When the baby, sluiced into the world
through your waters,
was given to you, red-faced, squalling
to hold close to your milky breast -
was that love you felt?
And, as the world was honed
to the body of another lover – after the divorce;
holding himself still within your deepest part,
was that love, you whispered in his ear?
As, filled with gratitude,
you came and came and came
legs wrapped around him
like jasmine tendrils on a trellis?
The dutiful incantations
at the end of phone calls
are approximations …
you have the airport farewells down pat.
But what do you tell your boy
when he asks
‘who do you love?’
what do you say?
20.10
finding solidity in emptiness:
a balustrade beneath the hand?
Or is it
the boy in the car seat behind you,
as you drive up roads known and unknown,
asking ‘where is God?’
Is he love?
Where is love?
The night you married his father
your stomach seven-months big with child,
you wept, as if you knew
the ruby would fall from your golden ring,
like the promises you made each other,
lost now.
When the baby, sluiced into the world
through your waters,
was given to you, red-faced, squalling
to hold close to your milky breast -
was that love you felt?
And, as the world was honed
to the body of another lover – after the divorce;
holding himself still within your deepest part,
was that love, you whispered in his ear?
As, filled with gratitude,
you came and came and came
legs wrapped around him
like jasmine tendrils on a trellis?
The dutiful incantations
at the end of phone calls
are approximations …
you have the airport farewells down pat.
But what do you tell your boy
when he asks
‘who do you love?’
what do you say?
20.10
I am
This windswept day, I am a grimy truck, Sisyphean,
carrying a burden of quarried rocks,
rough-hewn, heavy,
up the M14.
Just before dawn, I will return,
racheting gears downhill, my engine juddering into
the ears of dreaming children,
curled under duvets, murmuring in their sleep.
Today, I am the small bird
that thudded into the windowpane,
the bird whose red blood leaked out of its beak
as it lay gasping on the verandah tiles,
the bird I strangled, judging it too late for saving.
Now, I am the boy kicking his feet out from under
the swing at the gallery
who sees his shadow beneath him on the hard-bitten ground,
and says: ‘I am there, and here too’.
I buried the dead bird
in a hole I dug in the earth,
too close maybe
to the dark-leaved arrow of a new sapling.
My face crumpled like
a torn page
in the hand of a harsh poet.
My tears rained down.
Grief tugged at my throat,
like a baby at his mother’s nipple,
asking for her love.
20.10
carrying a burden of quarried rocks,
rough-hewn, heavy,
up the M14.
Just before dawn, I will return,
racheting gears downhill, my engine juddering into
the ears of dreaming children,
curled under duvets, murmuring in their sleep.
Today, I am the small bird
that thudded into the windowpane,
the bird whose red blood leaked out of its beak
as it lay gasping on the verandah tiles,
the bird I strangled, judging it too late for saving.
Now, I am the boy kicking his feet out from under
the swing at the gallery
who sees his shadow beneath him on the hard-bitten ground,
and says: ‘I am there, and here too’.
I buried the dead bird
in a hole I dug in the earth,
too close maybe
to the dark-leaved arrow of a new sapling.
My face crumpled like
a torn page
in the hand of a harsh poet.
My tears rained down.
Grief tugged at my throat,
like a baby at his mother’s nipple,
asking for her love.
20.10
Friday, October 17, 2008
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Prism
Like a crazed mirror ball
in a seedy dance hall,
her computer facets reality into
off-kiltre traces of flickering light.
Other peoples’ truths tilt and pitch
against the grubby velvet backdrop of the South African everyday.
Too loud
the stories pound in her ears
like overplayed rock and roll songs
from a lacklustre band.
Online news,
spills like faeces
from a blocked toilet.
The ground underfoot is as slippery as wet linoleum.
She processes the words,
but cannot quantify
the hurt.
They found:
broken bottles, two used condoms, bloodied clothes,
next to the body of the thirteen year old girl from Soweto,
whose skull had been crushed in.
‘One-year old found murdered under the bed.’
The headlines leer
and the copy
paws at her like a sick old man.
‘At the river’s edge/
The raped boys watched the man slit their friend’s throat/
after he asked ‘who wants to die first?' ’
Texts compete for degrees of atrocity.
‘The police are checking for signs,of sexual assault/
although blood was found between her thighs’.
Understanding motivation (the sociology of deprivation)
and rationalising cycles of abuse (a legacy of anger),
always the rankness of poverty,
hiding behind the stage lights,
does not assuage the fear.
Raw like the ragged riff of an electric guitar
in a minor key,
it slides into entropy.
The frantic beat
of horror
keeping
syncopated time.
15.10
in a seedy dance hall,
her computer facets reality into
off-kiltre traces of flickering light.
Other peoples’ truths tilt and pitch
against the grubby velvet backdrop of the South African everyday.
Too loud
the stories pound in her ears
like overplayed rock and roll songs
from a lacklustre band.
Online news,
spills like faeces
from a blocked toilet.
The ground underfoot is as slippery as wet linoleum.
She processes the words,
but cannot quantify
the hurt.
They found:
broken bottles, two used condoms, bloodied clothes,
next to the body of the thirteen year old girl from Soweto,
whose skull had been crushed in.
‘One-year old found murdered under the bed.’
The headlines leer
and the copy
paws at her like a sick old man.
‘At the river’s edge/
The raped boys watched the man slit their friend’s throat/
after he asked ‘who wants to die first?' ’
Texts compete for degrees of atrocity.
‘The police are checking for signs,of sexual assault/
although blood was found between her thighs’.
Understanding motivation (the sociology of deprivation)
and rationalising cycles of abuse (a legacy of anger),
always the rankness of poverty,
hiding behind the stage lights,
does not assuage the fear.
Raw like the ragged riff of an electric guitar
in a minor key,
it slides into entropy.
The frantic beat
of horror
keeping
syncopated time.
15.10
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
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